Football! Week 5 – Mexican Cucumber Recipe

Last week’s guest food item was an English cucumber. While his incredible length caused considerable envy, his football knowledge was pretty weak – he went 7-9. So it just goes to show that size doesn’t matter.

The Pieholes are starting to gain some interest in the games and are asking more questions about the games. So maybe my ploy to get them interested is starting to work. I did catch one of them saying “Go Packers” and immediately threatened grounding. Next lesson – they can only be Bears fans. We’ve just completed the 1st Quarter of the season and here are our records.

– Hedonist 47-17 (73.4% correct)

– Pieholes 29-35 (45.3%)

– Food items 36-28 (56.3%)

– ESPN Panel – 69.2%

As a reminder, the food item prediction process is basically like flipping a coin. I spin it around and if it points left the food item picks the home team. In the first couple of weeks that system did better than ESPN, although now it’s evened out. It’s still funny to me, though, that a food and wine blogger is doing better than guys who get paid to follow football.

Mexican-style (?) Cucumbers

The first time I had this was from a Mexican street vendor in Chicago back in the late 90s. Given that Chicago outlawed street food a long time ago, I’m not 100% sure that it was a legal business. He was coming down our street with one of those half-cart/half-bicycle contraptions and sold ice cream, mangoes on a stick, and cucumbers. So I have no idea if this is a common way to make cucumbers in Mexico, but I’m going with it. This is so easy and takes all of 2-3 minutes to make.

– 1 cucumber

– 1 lime

– salt

– cayenne pepper

1 – Peel the cucumber and thinly slice it.

2 – Arrange on a plate and squeeze the lime juice all over the slices

3 – Sprinkle with salt and cayenne pepper.

That’s it.

Week 5 Picks

This week’s guest is even bigger than the cucumber. It’s a daikon (Oriental Radish) that I almost got in a fight with a cougar over.